This disclosure relates to methods and systems for monitoring and control of hydroponic plant growing environments.
Hydroponic gardens and farms efficiently grow plants indoors, using no soil and yielding bigger, tastier, healthier produce year round. Hydroponic gardens use much less water than standard, soil-based gardens, which is critical in areas facing drought conditions. This is the future of farming for both urban growers and developing worlds alike. Key to the success and high yields of hydro-gardening is scientific-grade monitoring of the conditions and accurate control of the growing environment.
The legacy or pre-existing devices for monitoring hydroponic gardens are the manual and static “instantaneous” reading measuring instruments, such as air and liquid thermometers, hygrometers, and pH and electrical conductivity (EC) testers. These devices are traditionally used to monitor indoor growing systems by the user, at a prescribed time of day, manually inserting the tester into the air environment or nutrient solution and reading a result on a display. The user may note it mentally or in a log book or spreadsheet. Later the user may manually create a chart to show slow moving trends in the values in order to take remedial action, such as feed more nutrient, raise the pH, increase humidity or CO2. In order to implement these changes, some other manual operations would be required, such as to turn on a fan to reduce temperature, or inject pH adjuster into a reservoir. The effectiveness of the manual operations would depend on the skill and experience of the person, and could not consider many real-time conditions of the growing environment.
This document describes methods and devices that are directed to solving at least some of the issues described above.